Marchese and Dorfman End Sponsorship With Ultimate Poker

Tuesday, October 22nd, 2013 by Ryan

Ultimate Poker has been one of the most talked about new sites in a very long time, and a large reason for that is because it’s the first legal online poker site in the United States. It’s currently only legal in Nevada, but it was working on growing and putting some big names into the action to help grow traffic. Obviously the best way to grow their traffic and get attention is to have professional poker players playing on the site, and that is why they decided to sign on some big names. Two of the big names who signed on originally were poker pros Tom Marchese and Randy Dorfman, but both of these players have decided to end their sponsorship with Ultimate Poker, and they aren’t called a part of the “Team U”, which is the poker pro group on the site. It’s never good to see pros decide they want to drop from a site, but that’s especially true when it’s a new site.

When Dorfman signed on, he did so in June with other players like Dan O’Brien, Phil collins, Gavin Griffin, and Lauren Kling. Dorfman doesn’t have a huge live tournament resume, but he’s still brought in a total of more than $1.4 million in live tournament earnings. He earned a large chunk of that $1.4 million from two different tournaments cores, with the first one coming back in 2009 at the European Poker Tour’s €25,000 European High Roller Championship where he won $601,546 for finishing in second place, and the other one was back in 2011 when he finished in fifth place at the 2011 Aussie Million Main Event and won $321,432. While we were curious about why the two left the site, it’s still a bit confusing as to why.

Dorfman took to Facebook to break down his decision on why he left Ultimate Poker, and he stated “I have resigned from Ultimate Poker as their Team Pro. At this point in my life there are mor eimportant and creative things for me to be involved with. To have oyur ideas and experiences from the game I love fall on deaf ears while you bust your ass to build a game for a new Company just was extremely frustrating to me.” Well, that makes things seem a bit more intense, especially due to the fact that Dorfman seems like he wasn’t getting much help from the higher-ups as he was doing what he could to help things grow. He did add in that he wishes Ultimate Poker “the best” and hopes “things do turn around for them.”

No one is sure what the issues that Dorfman had with Ultimate Poker, and it’s also not good that things have to get “turned around” as he said. He did say something in a post on his blog earlier this month when he stated that “UP has not performed up to players expectations with their software in this early phase of release. In fact, it has been a disaster for all involved with UP as they expect the very best.”

For Tom Marchese, he has only been a part of Ultimate Poker for under two months, and he signed on back in early September. He didn’t say anything about the reason behind his decision, but Dorfman did post on Twitter that Marchese “left 4 many same reasons” that he did. Marchese has won more than $4.6 million in live poker tournaments throughout his career, and that also includes a $1.3 million score at the $100,000 Super High Roller Event back at the 2012 World Poker Tour World Championship. He also has two other final table finishes at the World Poker Tour, and also a final table finish at the World Series of Poker as well.

The remaining players who are still playing at Ultimate Poker as Team U, currently include the original member Antonio Esfandiari, as well as Jason Somerville, the previously mentioned Phil Collins, Jeremy Ausmus, Brent Hanks, O’Brien, William Reynolds, Kling, and Jeff Gross. It’ll be interesting to see what happens with Team U over the next few months here, and also what types of changes that Ultimate Poker decides to make.